Merry Christmas!

Merry Christmas, gentle blog reader!

Bobbi

Something to think about

Too many people put off something that brings them joy just because they haven’t thought about it, don’t have it on their schedule, didn’t know it was coming or are too rigid to depart from their routine.

I got to thinking one day about all those people on the Titanic who passed up dessert at dinner that fateful night in an effort to cut back. From then on, I’ve tried to be a little more flexible.

How many women out there will eat at home because their husband didn’t suggest going out to dinner until after something had been thawed? Does the word ‘refrigeration’ mean nothing to you?

How often have your kids dropped in to talk and sat in silence while you watched “Jeopardy” on television?

I cannot count the times I called my sister and said , “How about going to lunch in a half hour?” She would gas up and stammer, “I can’t. I have clothes on the line. My hair is dirty. I wish I had known yesterday. I had a late breakfast. It looks like rain.” And my personal favorite: “It’s Monday.” She died a few years ago. We never did have lunch together.

Because Americans cram so much into their lives, we tend to schedule our headaches.. We live on a sparse diet of promises we make to ourselves when all the conditions are perfect!

We’ll go back and visit the grandparents when we get Steve toilet-trained. We’ll entertain when we replace the living-room carpet. We’ll go on a second honeymoon when we get two more kids out of college.

Life has a way of accelerating as we get older. The days get shorter, and the list of promises to ourselves gets longer. One morning, we awaken, and all we have to show for our lives is a litany of “I’m going to,” “I plan on,” and “Someday, when things are settled down a bit.”

When anyone calls my “seize the moment” friend, she is open to adventure and available for trips. She keeps an open mind on new ideas. Her enthusiasm for life is contagious. You talk with her for five minutes, and you’re ready to trade your bad feet for a pair of rollerblades and skip an elevator for a bungee cord.

My lips have not touched ice cream in 10 years. I love ice cream. It’s just that I might as well apply it directly to my stomach with a spatula and eliminate the digestive process. The other day, I stopped the car and bought a triple-decker. If my car had hit an iceberg on the way home, I would have died happy.

Now…go on and have a nice day. Do something you WANT to…not something on your SHOULD DO list. If you were going to die soon and had only one phone call you could make, who would you call and what would you say? And why are you waiting?

Have you ever watched kids playing on a merry go round or listened to the rain lapping on the ground? Ever followed a butterfly’s erratic flight or gazed at the sun into the fading night? Do you run through each day on the fly? When you ask, “How are you?”, do you hear the reply?

When the day is done, do you lie in your bed with the next hundred chores running through your head? Ever told your child, “We’ll do it tomorrow” And in your haste, not see his sorrow? Ever lost touch? Let a good friendship die? Just call to say, “Hi”?

When you worry and hurry through your day, it is like an unopened gift….Thrown away….. Life is not a race. Take it slower. Hear the music before the song is over.

“Christmas is a time when kids tell Santa what they want and adults pay for it. Deficits are when adults tell the government what they want — and their kids pay for it.”–Richard Lamm

Thanksgiving Wishes!

Happy Thanksgiving!!!

NASA Discovers Water–And Lots of It–on the Moon!

Dear gentle blog reader:

It’s easy to lose track of the big picture in life…until something wonderful happens like NASA discovering H2O on the moon…even Google’s noting the event by changing it’s logo.
 
Here’s the scoop:

It’s official: There’s water ice on the moon, and lots of it. When melted, the water could potentially be used to drink or to extract hydrogen for rocket fuel.

 

NASA’s LCROSS probe discovered beds of water ice at the lunar south pole when it impacted the moon last month, mission scientists announced today. The findings confirm suspicions announced previously, and in a big way.

 

“Indeed, yes, we found water. And we didn’t find just a little bit, we found a significant amount,” Anthony Colaprete, LCROSS project scientist and principal investigator from NASA’s Ames Research Center at Moffett Field, Calif.

 

The LCROSS probe impacted the lunar south pole at a crater called Cabeus on Oct. 9. The $79 million spacecraft, preceded by its Centaur rocket stage, hit the lunar surface in an effort to create a debris plume that could be analyzed by scientists for signs of water ice.

 

Those signs were visible in the data from spectrographic measurements (which measure light absorbed at different wavelengths, revealing different compounds) of the Centaur stage crater and the two-part debris plume the impact created. The signature of water was seen in both infrared and ultraviolet spectroscopic measurements.

 

“We see evidence for the water in two instruments,” Colaprete said. “And that’s what makes us really confident in our findings right now.”

 

How much?

 

Based on the measurements, the team estimated about 100 kilograms of water in the view of their instruments — the equivalent of about a dozen 2-gallon buckets — in the area of the impact crater (about 66 feet, or 20 meters across) and the ejecta blanket (about 60 to 80 meters across), Colaprete said.

Here’s more on the story:

Is the World’s Newest Ocean Forming in Africa?

Hello gentle blog reader:

Scientists say a giant crack in Ethiopia, one that’s 20 ft wide in places and 35-miles long, may be the start of something big–so big, it could be a new ocean:

A 35-mile rift in the desert of Ethiopia will likely become a new ocean eventually, researchers now confirm.

 

The crack, 20 feet wide in spots, opened in 2005 and some geologists believed then that it would spawn a new ocean. But that view was controversial, and the rift had not been well studied.

 

A new study involving an international team of scientists and reported in the journal Geophysical Research Letters finds the processes creating the rift are nearly identical to what goes on at the bottom of oceans, further indication a sea is in the region’s future.

 

The same rift activity is slowly parting the Red Sea, too.

 

Using newly gathered seismic data from 2005, researchers reconstructed the event to show the rift tore open along its entire 35-mile length in just days. Dabbahu, a volcano at the northern end of the rift, erupted first, then magma pushed up through the middle of the rift area and began “unzipping” the rift in both directions, the researchers explained in a statement today.

 

“We know that seafloor ridges are created by a similar intrusion of magma into a rift, but we never knew that a huge length of the ridge could break open at once like this,” said Cindy Ebinger, professor of earth and environmental sciences at the University of Rochester and co-author of the study.

 

The result shows that highly active volcanic boundaries along the edges of tectonic ocean plates may suddenly break apart in large sections, instead of in bits, as the leading theory held. And such sudden large-scale events on land pose a much more serious hazard to populations living near the rift than would several smaller events, Ebinger said.

 

“The whole point of this study is to learn whether what is happening in Ethiopia is like what is happening at the bottom of the ocean where it’s almost impossible for us to go,” says Ebinger. “We knew that if we could establish that, then Ethiopia would essentially be a unique and superb ocean-ridge laboratory for us. Because of the unprecedented cross-border collaboration behind this research, we now know that the answer is yes, it is analogous.”

 

The African and Arabian plates meet in the remote Afar desert of Northern Ethiopia and have been spreading apart in a rifting process – at a speed of less than 1 inch per year – for the past 30 million years. This rifting formed the 186-mile Afar depression and the Red Sea. The thinking is that the Red Sea will eventually pour into the new sea in a million years or so. The new ocean would connect to the Red Sea and the Gulf of Aden, an arm of the Arabian Sea between Yemen on the Arabian Peninsula and Somalia in eastern Africa.

Here’s more on the story:

http://news.yahoo.com/s/livescience/giantcrackinafricawillcreateanewocean

FAA revokes licenses of pilots who missed the airport–pilots were using their PCs!

Dear blog reader:
Remember those NWA pilots who missed the Minneapolis airport by 150 miles and 1 hour? The FAA has suspended their licenses because the pilots admit they were too busy using their PCs instead of concentrating on flying the plane!

One imagines the pilots writing emails or playing Spider Solitaire when they should have been paying attention to flying the plane–how ridiculous!

Here’s more on the story:

http://www.nydailynews.com/news/national/2009/10/27/2009-10-27_faa_revokes_licenses_of_wayward_northwest_airlines_pilots.html

The Federal Aviation Administration on Tuesday revoked the licenses of the two Northwest Airlines pilots who overshot their Minneapolis destination by 150 miles.

The pilots – Timothy Cheney of Gig Harbor, Wash., the captain, and Richard Cole of Salem, Ore., the first officer – told safety investigators they were working
on their personal laptop computers and lost track of time and place.

The pilots, who were out of communications with air traffic controllers for 91 minutes, violated numerous federal safety regulations in the incident last Wednesday night, the FAA said in a statement. The violations included failing to comply with air traffic control instructions and clearances and operating carelessly and recklessly, the agency said.
“You engaged in conduct that put your passengers and your crew in serious jeopardy,” FAA regional counsel Eddie Thomas said in a letter to Cheney.

Northwest Flight 188 was not in communications with controllers or the airline dispatchers “while you were on a frolic of your own. … This is a total dereliction and disregard for your duties.”
A similar letter was sent to Cole.

The pilots said they were brought back to awareness when a flight attendant contacted them on the aircraft’s intercom. By then, they were over Wisconsin at 37,000 feet. They turned the Airbus A320 with its 144 passengers around and landed safely in Minneapolis.

The revocations of the pilots’ commercial licenses are effective immediately, the FAA said. The pilots have 10 days to appeal the emergency revocations to the National Transportation Safety Board. If that fails, they can apply for a new certificate after one year.

The pilots’ union at Delta Air Lines, which acquired Northwest last year, had cautioned against a rush to judgment. The pilots told investigators who
interviewed them on Sunday that they had no previous accidents or safety incidents.

Delta spokesman Anthony Black said in a statement: “The pilots in command of Northwest Flight 188 remain suspended until the conclusion of the investigations into this incident.”

….

http://www.nydailynews.com/news/national/2009/10/27/2009-10-27_faa_revokes_licenses_of_wayward_northwest_airlines_pilots.html

And, here’s more on the original story: http://bobbiblogger.wordpress.com/2009/10/27/faa-suspends-licenses-of-pilots-who-missed-the-airport-pilots-were-using-their-pcs/

 

Bye, Bye, Big Mac–McDonald’s Exits Iceland

Hello, gentle blog reader,

McDonald’s only franchise in Iceland will close this weekend because the country’s currency woes and tariffs make operating the fast food restaurants unprofitable.

I think most Icelanders will say “Bless” (good-bye) and feel “blessed” to be McDonald’s-free!

Here’s more on the story:

REYKJAVIK, Iceland (AP) — The Big Mac, long a symbol of globalization, has become the latest victim of this tiny island nation’s overexposure to the world financial crisis

Iceland’s three McDonald’s restaurants — all in the capital Reykjavik — will close next weekend, as the franchise owner gives in to falling profits caused by the collapse in the Icelandic krona.

“The economic situation has just made it too expensive for us,” Magnus Ogmundsson, the managing director of Lyst Hr., McDonald’s franchise holder in Iceland, told The Associated Press by telephone on Monday.

Lyst was bound by McDonald’s requirement that it import all the goods required for its restaurants — from packaging to meat and cheeses — from Germany.

Costs had doubled over the past year because of the fall in the krona currency and high import tariffs on imported goods, Ogmundsson said, making it impossible for the company to raise prices further and remain competitive with competitors that use locally sourced produce.

A Big Mac in Reykjavik already retails for 650 krona ($5.29). But the 20 percent increase needed to make a decent profit would have pushed that to 780 krona ($6.36), he said.

That would have made the Icelandic version of the burger the most expensive in the world, a title currently held jointly by Switzerland and Norway where it costs $5.75, according to The Economist magazine’s 2009 Big Mac index.

The decision to shutter the Icelandic franchise was taken in agreement with McDonald’s Inc., Ogmundsson said, after a review of several months.

“The unique operational complexity of doing business in Iceland combined with the very challenging economic climate in the country makes it financially prohibitive to continue the business,” Theresa Riley, a spokeswoman at McDonald’s headquarters in Oak Brook, Illinois, said in a statement. “This complex set of challenges means we have no plans to seek a new partner in Iceland.”

McDonald’s, the world’s largest chain of hamburger fast food restaurants, arrived in Reykjavik in 1993 when the country was on an upward trajectory of wealth and expansion.

The first person to take a bite out of a Big Mac on the island was then-Prime Minister David Oddsson. Oddsson went on to become governor of the country’s central bank, Sedlabanki, a position that he was forced out of by lawmakers earlier this year after a public outcry about his inability to prevent Iceland’s financial crisis.

Lyst plans to reopen the stores under a new brand name, Metro, using locally sourced materials and produce and retaining the franchise’s current 90-strong staff.

Ogmundsson said it was unlikely that Lyst would ever seek to regain the McDonald’s franchise with Iceland still struggling to get back on its feet after the credit crisis crippled its overweight banking system, damaging the rest of its economy, last October.

“I don’t think anything will happen that will change the situation in any significant way in the next few years,” Ogmundsson said.

It is not the first time that McDonald’s, which currently operates in more than 119 countries on six continents, has exited a country. Its one and only restaurant in Barbados closed after just six months in 1996 because of slow sales. In 2002, the company pulled out of seven countries, including Bolivia, that had poor profit margins as part of an international cost-cutting exercise.

http://finance.yahoo.com/news/Iceland-says-goodbye-to-the-apf-2609404079.html?x=0&.v=6

***Be sure to check out these jokes about the economy:
The Economy is so bad … ;–) (humor)

P.S. For more on Iceland’s economic crisis, see these articles:

Bye, Bye, Big Mac–McDonald’s Exits Iceland

http://bobbiblogger.wordpress.com/2008/10/09/iceland-bankrupt-what-will-the-domino-effect-be/

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB122718166821744225.html?mod=googlenews_wsj

I Already Owe $38,375 and I Only Own a Dollhouse

Arguing Pilots Miss the Airport by 150 Miles and 1 hr!

Update:  Pilots were using their laptops while in the cockpit rather than focusing on flying the plane:

http://bobbiblogger.wordpress.com/2009/10/27/faa-suspends-licenses-of-pilots-who-missed-the-airport-pilots-were-using-their-pcs/

Good morning, gentle blogger,
Yes, in this morning’s news, the TRUE story of pilots so busy arguing that they missed the airport by 150 miles and 1 hr! Hard to believe that pilots get paid so much $$$:

http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2009/oct/23/northwest-pilots-argument-miss-runway